Nothing for Money

End of the World, Mayan Edition jokes were all the rage at every new year’s party, and they’ll continue to be popular throughout 2012. If you don’t find them funny or are already starting to feel Death Clock fatigue, you’re going to hate the rest of this year. As we get closer to December 21, the jokes will get worse, the news will devote actual coverage to this, and teenage boys will try to convince girlfriends to let them into their panties because time’s running out. Sometimes it’ll even work. In fact, we have a recent precedent for how everyone reacts when a group says the world’s going to end thanks to Harold Camping’s Family Radio Worldwide's bullshit proclamation that we were all going to die on May 21 of last year.

After I interviewed Tom Evans, one of the Family Radio heads a month before that prediction came and went like a fart bubble in a bath tub, everyone I spoke to had the same reaction: They’re fucking crazy. But harmless crazy, so let’s all laugh at them and move on with our lives. And they were crazy, yes. And the correct reaction was, of course, to chuckle at their expense. But harmless, they were decidedly not.

But that’s just a bunch of stupid people getting rid of their stupid money, right? Serves them right, supporting a half-crazed nutball like that! In fact, I’m going to draw a line right here in this large bin of sand, so us brain-havers can step on one side of it. But hold up there, anyone who pays a tithing or drops a quarter in the collection plate, you stay on that side with Camping’s flock. They may actually be the sanest (donation-wise, at least) of the lot of you.

While their specific take isn’t clear because, wisely, the Catholic Church makes it not very easy to obtain this information, the church’s net gain, their profit, in the year 2000 was $8 million. Adjust for inflation, and realize they rake in this type of dough every year, and soon enough you're not talking millions anymore, but billions with a motherfucking b.

- In that whole Israel/Palestine mess, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld a law that keeps Palestinians who marry Israelis from getting citizenship, in order to make sure that Israel remains, forever and ever, a Jewish-majority state.

- Good news: A mother in North Carolina is challenging a Bible giveaway at her son’s public school because of the whole “keeping religion out of the classroom” thing. Bad news: The whole story’s probably just going to turn into one of those “Weird News from the Countryside” bits, since the mother in question practices Witchcraft.